He carried her across the bridge at dawn, before the farm was properly awake.
The river was quieter than it had been a week ago. The water had dropped a little, and it was more green than brown. Mist lay on it in long white strips. A few early carts rattled over the bridge beside him. One carter nodded at the drowned Fallow boy with a bundle in a scorched blanket. Tam nodded back and kept walking.
The general store wasn't open yet. He sat on its step with Lozar in his lap until the bald shopkeeper came and unbolted the door.
"Shrimp boy," said the shopkeeper. He looked at the bundle and didn't ask.
"A spade, please."
It cost three coins. It was an iron blade on a long ash handle, and it was heavier than the hammer and the knife put together. Tam carried it out over his shoulder with Lozar in his other arm. He had sixteen coins left. He didn't think about them.
* * *
Father Aereck was in the graveyard behind the church, picking up fallen twigs from between the headstones. In the game, his examine text had said Looks a bit holy. He looked up as Tam came through the gate, and smiled. Then he saw what Tam was carrying, and stopped smiling.
"Tam," he said. "What have you got there?"
"It's Lozar," said Tam. "From the house across the river. The goblins killed her, a few weeks back, and nobody ever buried her. They just moved in around her." He swallowed. "The goblins are gone now. I found her yesterday."
Aereck put down his twigs. He came over and stood beside the bundle.
"Old Lozar," he said softly. "Everyone said she died in it. I hoped she'd got away." He shook his head. "She never came to church. She told me once she'd had her fill of gods when she was young, and she'd thank me not to mention any of them. But every midsummer she sent me a jar of honey from her bees. Every single year."
"I didn't know her," said Tam.
"No. I don't suppose many people did." Aereck's eyes went to the spade on Tam's shoulder. "You want to dig it yourself."
"If that's all right."
"It's more than all right."
Aereck showed him a place along the east wall of the graveyard, under an old yew tree, where the ground was soft and nobody else lay close. Tam dug.
It took most of the morning. The soil was full of stones and roots. His arms were still farm boy arms, with Strength level 1 in them, whatever that meant here. Twice Aereck offered to fetch the man who dug the graves, and twice Tam said no. The priest didn't argue. He sat on a nearby headstone to keep him company. He talked about the church and the weather, and about the three times he had got tangled up in the bell ropes. Each story was worse than the last.
When the hole was deep enough, Tam climbed out and laid the bundle at the bottom, as gently as he could. Aereck stood at the head of the grave and said the words.
Tam didn't know the words. He stood with his hands folded and his head down, and listened. The words were old and plain, and they asked Saradomin to look after someone who hadn't asked for it.
Then he filled the grave in.
He watched the edge of his sight while he did it, feeling sick. Beside the river, every set of goblin bones he buried had sent up a little number. These were burnt bones, and a person's. He hoped, very hard, that nothing would happen.
He patted the last of the earth flat with the back of the spade.
+4.5 Prayer.
He stood there with the spade in his hands and stared at the number until it faded.
Bones were bones. The game had counted the goblins, and now it had counted an old woman who had run from a dragon and kept bees.
He felt like he had robbed her grave while he was filling it in.
"Tam?" said Aereck. "Are you all right, lad? You've gone white."
"I'm fine." He wasn't. He swallowed. "Father. Is it wrong to get something out of burying somebody?"
Aereck glanced at the grave, and back.
"What do you think you got?"
"I don't know," said Tam honestly. "Something. It felt like taking."
Aereck folded his ink-stained hands. "Do you know what the oldest prayer is? Older than any church. Older than any god's name. It's this." He nodded at the turned earth. "Somebody dies, and somebody else, who didn't have to, puts them in the ground gently and says they mattered. If you came away from that with something in your heart, Tam, I don't think you stole it. I think that's what it's for."
Prayer, he thought. In the game it had just been a skill, a number you raised by burying bones. He hadn't wondered why.
I'll take it like that, he thought.
Aereck yawned suddenly behind his hand, and looked embarrassed. "Forgive me. I didn't sleep. That noise in the graveyard again, half the night. Moaning, almost. I'm sure it's the wind in the yew."
Tam thought about a skeleton with no skull, lying in a coffin in this very graveyard, waiting for somebody to bring its head back.
Not yet, he thought. One thing at a time.
"I'm sure it's the wind," he said.
* * *
Osric's hut stood on the east bank right by the bridge. It was a low wooden place with nets hung on poles all around it to dry, and a rowing boat pulled up on the mud. Tam had walked past it half a dozen times in the last week without stopping. This time, on his way home with the spade over his shoulder, he stopped.
A big man sat outside the hut on an upturned crate, mending a net. He was in his fifties, broad and heavy, with dark brown skin and a short beard going grey. His big hands were covered in old white scars from line and hook. He worked the net without looking at it.
Wren was down by the boat, gutting fish into a bucket. She looked up when Tam's shadow fell on the mud. Her face did nothing at all.
"Fallow," she said.
"Hi."
The big man looked up from his net and looked Tam over slowly.
"Tam Fallow," he said. His voice was deep and unhurried. "Seth's lad. My girl pulled you out."
"She did. You must be Osric." Wren's dad, Tam thought. Not from the game. Nobody from the game. Just a man who fishes. "Thank you. For her. I mean, thank you for... raising her to jump in rivers after strangers."
Osric thought about this. "She did that herself," he said at last, and went back to his net.
Wren wiped her knife on her trousers and stood up. "You cleared Lozar's house," she said.
It wasn't a question. Tam blinked. "How do you know that?"
"I run past it every morning. No goblins this morning. No smoke. And I took the fish up to the Groats' after, and Gillie said you went in on your own. Five of them?"
"Five."
"On your own."
"Yes."
"Four days ago you couldn't hold a sword."
"I still can't hold Harlan's," said Tam. "I can hold mine."
Wren didn't say anything. She just looked at him with those dark, steady eyes. He had the feeling she was doing a sum in her head and didn't like the answer.
He took a breath. He had thought about this on the walk from the graveyard. He had thought about it the night before, too, sitting beside Lozar in the barn.
He reached into his shirt and took out the bronze dagger, his first one. He had a better one now, in his inventory. Lozar's iron dagger was longer and sharper. But this was the one he'd made.
He held it out to her, handle first.
"I want you to have this," he said. "For the river."
Wren didn't take it.
"I made it," Tam said. "It's the first real thing I ever made. Here. I mean. In my whole life, really. I know it's a butter knife. I know you've got a sword. But I can't take anything from anybody, and I owe you, and giving's the only thing I can do. So I'd like to give you this."
Wren was quiet for a moment. Down by the boat, a gull landed on the gunwale and eyed her bucket of fish.
"Keep it," she said.
"Wren..."
"I don't want paying for the river, Fallow."
"It's not paying."
"It is to me." She said it flatly, without any heat. "You don't pay somebody for that. You just don't."
He opened his mouth to argue. Osric spoke first, without looking up from his net.
"First thing you make, you keep," Osric said slowly. "I had my first net thirty years. It rotted in the end. Still kept it."
Wren nodded, as if her father had said exactly what she meant.
"Keep it," she said again. "You'll want it when you're old, to show people. You can say, 'This is what I made, before I could hold a sword.'" Her face stayed perfectly straight. "'My butter knife.'"
Slowly, Tam put the dagger away.
"Okay," he said. "But I still owe you."
"Then owe me." Wren turned back to the boat, picked up a stone and threw it at the gull, which left in a huff. She knelt by her bucket and went back to work. Over her shoulder, without looking at him, she said, "Harlan drills on the hill every evening. Anybody can come."
That was the end of the conversation.
Osric glanced up at Tam. The corners of his grey beard lifted.
"She likes you," he said.
"She threw a stone at a seagull."
"Aye," said Osric. "She does that when she likes people."
Tam walked home up the east bank with his spade on his shoulder, past the empty house where Lozar had lived. He didn't really know what had just happened. He was fairly sure he'd been invited to something.
He owed her, and she wouldn't let him pay. He'd have to think of something.
* * *
He spent the afternoon mucking out the cow shed with his own spade, as Seth had ordered. The shed stank. Jory sat on the gate and watched him. Jory asked questions about the goblins until Tam told him about the big one with the pot on its head. Jory laughed so hard he fell off the gate.
When he climbed back on, Tam stopped shovelling. He leaned the spade against the wall and wiped his hands on his trousers.
"Jory," he said. "Hold your hand out."
Jory held his hand out, suspicious, as if Tam were going to put a frog in it.
Tam turned away for a moment, took the spare hammer out of his inventory, and put it in Jory's palm. It was the goblin's hammer, the plain iron one, exactly like his own. He'd scrubbed the goblin off it in the river.
"For you," he said. "You're good at making things. You made that sword. Now you can make better ones."
Jory looked up at Tam, and his face did something complicated.
"But things fall," Jory said. "When people give you things. They fall through."
"When people give things to me," said Tam. "Not when I give them to you."
Jory closed his fingers around the handle, slowly, as if he expected it to go through his hand. He had watched a coat, a sword, a jar of coins and a whole week's wages go through Tam's hands. It didn't.
"It stays," Jory whispered. "Shrimp stayed. But that was food. This is a hammer."
"It stays," Tam agreed. He had found that out with two shrimp, the day he went to the swamp, and it was still the best rule he had.
Jory held the hammer a moment longer. Then he jumped down off the gate and ran across the yard toward the farmhouse. He shouted for Gillie at the top of his voice, holding the hammer over his head like a sword.
Tam picked up his spade and went back to the cow shed. He was smiling, and he didn't try to stop.
* * *
In the evening he took the milk and eggs up to the castle, for the first time.
Gillie had the churn and the basket ready by the dairy door. She didn't hand them to him. Since the wages, she had stopped handing him things. She set them on the step and stood back. He picked them up himself, and they stayed. He carried them down the bank and over the bridge, arms aching.
The kitchen door was around the back of the castle, down three steps, through a yard full of barrels. A guard there looked at the churn, decided Tam was who he said he was, and waved him in.
The castle kitchen was huge and full of steam. There was a range along one wall, a long table down the middle covered in flour, and pans hanging everywhere. Standing in the middle of it all, wringing a cloth in both hands, was the Cook.
He was a thin man with a drooping brown moustache, in a tall white hat, a white apron and blue-and-white striped trousers, with flour up to his elbows.
The Cook, Tam thought. In the game, the Lumbridge Cook stood in this kitchen and gave new players their first quest. He had a handful of lines about his trouble, and they were all panic.
"Milk," said the Cook, seeing the churn. "Eggs. Oh, thank Saradomin. No. Wait. Those are for the household. The steward counts every egg." He sat down suddenly on a stool. "It's no good."
"What's no good?" said Tam, putting the churn down.
"The Duke's birthday!" The Cook waved his cloth at the ceiling. "It's the Duke's birthday, and I'm to bake him a cake, and I've forgotten to order anything for it. Not a drop of extra milk. Not an egg. Not so much as a pot of flour. Your farm's sold every drop it has at market, and the miller's booked till the end of the month. I've four children and a goat to look after, lad. I've burned every cake I ever made, every single one, and now I can't even burn this one, because I've got nothing to burn it with."
He looked up at Tam with wet, desperate eyes.
"You look like a capable lad," he said. "A bucket of milk, an egg and a pot of flour. Could you find them for me? Any way you can?"
Something flickered at the edge of Tam's sight.
He opened his quest list. For a week it had been empty, just a heading with nothing under it. Now there was one line.
Cook's Assistant.
It was the game's name, in the game's colour for a quest you hadn't started.
Maybe that's how it fills, he thought. Somebody asks.
In the game, it had taken about five minutes. Here, he didn't own a bucket and could barely milk a cow. The nearest flour was out on the Draynor road, at a mill he had never been inside.
"I'll try," he said.
The Cook seized his hand in both of his floury ones and shook it as if he might never let go. Nothing slipped. Apparently being thanked was allowed.